clicks, snaps, noise

hello everyone, good morning.
this is what's happening. when i'm recording audio or MIDI I hear strange (and annoying) noises. kind of like "static" "pops", things like that. there's no pattern, just kind of random.
does anyone know what i'm talking about?
thanks so much, if you need more information please let me know 

yes, we all know of that at some point. :) What is your audio interface? Put that in your sig too.
 
Buffer sizes play a huge part in this behavior. Post up your interface specs and we'll take it from there
 

Considering you are using a laptop another question would be are you using the factory installed version of Windows or have you done a clean install? Prebuilt systems come with a ton of bloatware that can really bugger up a system, especially for audio. When (or if) you return let us know if that is the case. If so you can do a clean install of Windows or remove the bloatware using a program like CCleaner (because bloatware tends to be rather stubborn and sometimes won't be fully removed through the Win Add/Remove programs function) or simply disable those programs through the control panel.
 
There are many factors here but to pin down the problem more info is needed. Your system specs look fine though but another potential problem might be the hard drive speed. Many laptops come with slower drives that can cause issues. 7200rpm or faster is recommended for audio. If it has an SSD drive though then it should be fine.

hello everyone, thank you all for answering, now I will try and answer your questions.
my interface is M-AUDIO MOBILE_PRE
i', using ASIO buffer size is 128
this just started happening, as per beeepster I have downloaded CCleaner (I paid for it). I will run that and see what's what.
the interface I have has always been reliable (sort of) ever since I started using X-2 however there seems to be problems.
again, I appreciate all your help and suggestions. 

Agreed. Up your interface buffers up incrementally until the problem goes away while recording. This way you get more resources for recording while introducing the least latency possible.
 
While editing and mixing you can crank them up as high as you want because it doesn't matter. The only thing that will be noticeable will be it might take a half second or so for playback to begin. This is important because as you add effects it will consume more resources which will contribute to dropouts.
 
You shouldn't run into this with the power you've got BUT if you need to record another part after you have already added a bunch of effects or have a bunch of soft synths running then use the Freeze button on the track which will temporarily bounce the track with effects and free up resources. Then turn down your interface audio buffers, record your parts, increase your interface buffers back up to mixing/editing levels and then hit the freeze button again on all the tracks which will "Unfreeze" them so you can adjust effects and synth parameters for mixing again.
 
Alternatively if you only need to hear a couple specific tracks to record your new part you can use the Archive button on all the unnecessary tracks which will silence the tracks and stop them from accessing computer resources.
 
Oh and be careful with CCleaner. All you want to use it for in this case is to remove unwanted programs. The Remove Programs feature is a separate tool from the actually system cleaner and disk defrag stuff. DO NOT RUN THE CCLEANER UNLESS YOU UNDERSTAND IT!!
 
If you run the cleaner it will show a bunch of stuff it may deem unnecessary but unless you know what it is you may not want to remove it. It requires a bit of knowledge to use that function. However the default cleaner scan and removal generally won't remove anything important (usually just internet cache, missing dll's and other non essential stuff). Just something to be aware of. If something DOES screw up though CCleaner creates a restore point which is accessible via the Windows Recovery options. If you need to you simply use that restore point and your computer will revert back to the state it was at before the cleaning which should fix any problems. So make SURE you always let it create a restore point before letting CCleaner remove anything from your system.
 
Cheers.

I've only had to mess with the Sync/Caching buffers once on a project that was overloaded with audio tracks all trying to write/retrieve from a single drive (which may indeed help in this case considering it is a laptop) but I ALWAYS observe the methods I posted above.
 
Recording: Open the Scarlett MixControl software (or ASIO Control Panel within Sonar but for some reason that doesn't reliably launch the app so I just open MixControl directly) and lower my buffers to reduce latency.
 
Editing/mixing: Open MixControl and increase buffers.
 
Although my system is quite powerful and I rarely experience dropouts after purchasing the Scarlett by doing this I have greatly reduced any glitches, freezeups and/or crashes while doing more intensive and plugin heavy work. I just do it out of habit now even if I'm not experiencing problems because frankly glitches suck and they harsh my mellow, duuuude.
 
But that's just me and I'm... well... me. ;-)